Parkour Flipbook - Parkour video

I came across this cool animation of parkour using flip book style.This isn’t the first time I have heard about parkour, I first heard about it in a episode of The Office, and even on Facebook. It seemed to me that this word and the underlying concept it refered to were rather familiar to me.

What is parkour? Definition of parkour :

parkour n. [pärkur']

“sport or athletic activity in which the participant seeks to move quickly and fluidly through an area, often an urban locale, by surmounting obstacles such as walls and railings and leaping across open spaces, as in a stairwell or between buildings.” [The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition]

French words in English

The English word parkour is actually a phonetic and graphical adaptation of the French word parcours.

parcours n.m. [paRku:R]

“Déplacement déterminé accompli ou à accomplir d’un point à un autre; espace correspondant, chemin, distance parcourue” [TLFi]

So with no further ado, the parkour video I promised :

vousaimer v.trans. [vuzεme]

[Le sujet désigne généralement une personne (que l'on vouvoie par respect pour la langue et la tradition françaises)] Éprouver, par affinité naturelle ou élective, une forte attirance pour quelqu’un.

Vousaimer is a classique michèlisme, it didn’t really exist until I made it up and started using it. So what does it all mean, well it all comes back to the tutoie vs. vouvoie paradigm. Since there are certain people that you will have to vouvoie in your life, an occasion may arise in which you would like to express your love for this vous in front of you.

Shouldn’t the correct French sentence be: Je vous aime. ? Well, obviously, yes. But coming from a different culture, can you really love someone whom you refer to using vous? To me it sounded ridiculous, the one time I actually tried to say je vous aime, I felt insincere. So until the French language gets rid of this formal you, I have come up with a better solution - the brand new awesome verb - vousaimer.

Brought to you totally free of charge, this new verb will put a little fun into your vocabulary and take the stress out of vouvoying. Simply pick the subject of your sentence (probably the first person singular je), next pick the personal pronoun for your preceding object (not vous since we are trying to avoid that), then conjugate the verb vousaimer accordingly. Here are some examples :

• je te vousaime
• nous te vousaimons
• il me vousaime

I still haven’t mastered what to do when you may love 2 people in the same sentence, yet I am not as opposed to the plural vous as I am to the formal vous, so I would probably recommend a classic correct French sentence like je vous aime. So pour tous mes lecteurs - je vous aime comme un collectif, mais individuellement, je te vousaime beaucoup.